Scope and Objectives:

The course provides the understanding
necessary to teach English, and writing, in the schools. It focuses
on the basic grammatical constructions of English and several
approaches to describing and representing them. We will
cover

lexical categories (Parts of
Speech),

syntactic categories (such as phrases, clauses,
tense, and aspect),

grammatical and dependency
relations,

syntactic structure of the sentence,

analysis of sentence and text
connection

We will use some of the on-line tools
for automated POS tagging and graphing ("diagramming"). By the end
of the course, you will be able to describe most of the major
syntactic constructions of English in several ways. In addition,
you will be able analyze the cohesion of sentences in connected
text.

Written Work and Grading:

Written work will
consist of one 3-4 page paper ("tagger project"), 2 midterms, and
final. Selected exercises from the textbooks will be part of the
class preparation and participation grade. Each of these will make
up one-fifth of the final grade.

Then in the Watson and Crick paper linked above as A Science Paper, identify each instance of a passive construction and classify it as a short passive, a full passive, a prepositional passive, a bare passive, or an adjectival passive.